Virginia Tan, Lean In China & HerStartup

Virginia Tan

Co-founder, Lean In China & HerStartup

Virginia Tan is the founder and managing director of Lean In China, a women’s platform with over 80,000 members across more than 25 cities and 50 universities in China, which supports the goals and aspirations of Chinese women. She also founded the Her Startup competition in 2015, the first global tech entrepreneurship competition for female founders, which held 12 rounds across China, USA and South East Asia in 2016. Together with two millenial Chinese women, she is also a founding partner of Orenda Ventures, an early stage venture capital fund investing in technologies and startups emerging out of the Her Startup competition, to address the funding needs of women entrepreneurs as well as seeking to use technology as a bridge to build deeper ties between East and West as well as encourage social innovation in China.

Virginia’s background is in law and finance, where she was an experienced finance lawyer for more than 8 years specialising on strategic investment in the energy, resources and infrastructure sectors in emerging and frontier markets, and has worked in Europe, Middle East, Asia, Africa and South America representing governments, large corporates and financial institutions for 2 magic circle firms. She moved to Beijing to work on investments related to the “One Belt One Road” initiative representing Chinese state owned companies and banks. She is deeply passionate about using capital and expertise from the private sector as a tool for facilitating sustainable development in developing countries. She has extensive experience advising pro bono NGOs and charities on social financing and commercial issues.